Innovation that matters to you

Hacking for a healthier future

It’s no secret that your doctors’ visits of today will be radically different than the doctors’ visits you’ll experience tomorrow. Consumer health trackers, mobile health apps and cloud-based data portals are giving consumers, patients and caregivers access to large amounts of data – but how can this data become valuable and actionable?

We are looking at islands of data from a clinical perspective, with EMRs (electronic medical records), consumer sensor data and environmental data. People are overwhelmed by the mountains of data that is available to them. Connecting all of this data will provide more frequent interactions between patient and physician, and also allow for consumers to take a more active role in managing his or her own health – and we’ve seen many technology companies start to jump into this space.

Enter the HealthSuite Digital Platform (HSDP). What makes HealthSuite unique is that it leverages our expertise of data integration in thousands of hospitals and homes around the world. Let me give you some facts: over 15 petabytes of data is managed in our imaging informatics solutions; we see over 2 million total patientrecords in one of the world’s richest ICU-centric longitudinal databases; 40 million babies are born annually with Philips fetal monitors; 190 million patients are monitored with Philips patient monitors in hospitals each year; and 1 million patients are monitored with Philips solutions and services in their homes every day.

With HealthSuite Digital Platform, we’re able to take the data from fitness trackers, environmental sources (like your home air filtration system) and integrate that with the health data (as mentioned above) collected from your physicians’ offices. The HSDP enables both consumers and care teams to easily see a holistic view of the entire patient journey and best utilize that health data to achieve healthy living, prevent disease, diagnose at any time, create treatment plans, and to enable recovery in the comfort of home.

As Head of the HealthSuite Digital Platform, I have a passion for connected health. I am really looking forward to see what developers can do to enhance connected health during our first-ever external hackathon on the HealthSuite Digital Platform, happening right now in San Francisco. We’ve asked developers to come and help us design a prototype of the next generation of healthy living applications on our open platform, which will impact patients, healthcare providers, Accountable Care Organizers and even employers who offer wellness incentives. There have been a lot of exciting things happening at the event thus far and I invite you to follow the live coverage from our @philipslivefrom Twitter handle

We’ll announce the winners of our hackathon in the next few days. The grand prize winners will have a chance to demonstrate their application at our spaces during SXSW® Interactive in Austin, Texas next week. Winners will also have the opportunity to discuss their app idea with Philips leadership for further development. Stay tuned to learn more about other upcoming hackathons.

I’ll leave with you this: if you had the chance to develop the next app to enhance the world’s health, what would you create?

Dale Wiggins

Vice President and General Manager, Philips HealthSuite Digital Platform

Dale Wiggins is Vice President and General Manager of the Philips HealthSuite Digital Platform. The HealthSuite Digital Platform is the core infrastructure for Philips’ informatics solutions, with patient-centricity and continuity of care built into the design.